Christian Schwochow Retrospective

The Retrospective at HIFF 2018

The Retrospective at HIFF 2018 facilitated by Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, brings a seminal body of work by German Director Christian Schwochow. Representing the contemporary face of German cinema, his filmography has earned him International acclaim and appreciation. The Retrospective section kicks off on Sunday 25th March with Paula, Schwochow’s 2016 film on German artist Paula Modersohn-Becker that topped the art house charts in Germany for weeks. The films in the retrospective will be introduced by Surjodoy Chatterjee, Coordinator of the German Film Archive for South Asian region located at the Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, Kolkata.

Christian Schwochow grew up in Leipzig, East Berlin, and, since 1990, in Hannover. As a child, he appeared in East German Radio play productions. As a teenager, he became publisher and editor-in-chief of youth magazine Shot! After high school graduation in 1998, he worked as an author, speaker and reporter for various radio stations. From 2002 to 2008, Schwochow studied to become a film director, with an emphasis on feature films, at the Film Academy Baden-Württemberg. His graduate film was the feature, Novemberkind (November Child). He wrote the screenplays for both Marta and Her Flying Grandfather and November Child together with his mother, author and director Heide Schwochow. The two-part TV series The Tower, adapted from Uwe Tellkamp’s novel of the same name, earned Christian Schwochow the 2013 Grimme-Prize. Christian Schwochow lives in Berlin.

Schedule:Paula –25 March at 4:00pm | The Stein Auditorium Cracks in the Shell – 26 March at 6.30pm | Gulmohar​The Tower –27 March at 6:30pm| Gulmohar West – 28 March at 6:30pm | Gulmohar Bornholmer Strasse – 29 March at 9:00pm | The Stein Auditorium In The Middle Of Germany: NSU – “The Perpetrators –Today Is Not The End” – 30 March at 2:00pm | The Stein Auditorium

It is a great honor for the Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan to contribute to this year’s International Film Festival at the Habitat Centre, New Delhi. Movies open a window into other worlds; we look into other forms of leading daily lives, other forms of dealing with love and dissent, success and failure, triumph and pain. We follow foreign lives, glued to the screen, with tears in our eyes, or bursting into laughter – of relief and excitement. Films are a beautiful medium of cultural exchange, and for
this reason they are so important for the Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan. Our mandate is to encourage and enable inter-cultural understanding and dialogue and to advance joint projects with partners in our host countries. In a time in which the polarization of the citizenry seems to be a strategy, film festivals like the one organized by the India Habitat Centre are important activities which represent the desire for dialogue, mutual respect and understanding. We are delighted to participate and we wish the festival all the success it deserves.